Mughal school, 1618
Gouache on paper; 12.4 x 15.4 cm
Bodleian Library (MS Ouseley Add. 171, f.4v.)
This chill and moving study of a dying courtier is one of the most famous of all Mughal portraits. Wasted by his opium addiction and alcoholism, "lnayat Khan was brought before Jahangir to obtain leave to journey to Agra, on the day before his death. The Emperor was both appalled and fascinated by his condition. He described the occasion in his memoirs: On this day news came of the death of 'Inayat Khan. He was one of my intimate attendants. As he was addicted to opium, and when
he had the chance, to drinking as well, by degrees he became maddened with wine. As he was weakly built, he took more than he could digest, and was attacked by the disease of diarrhoea, and in this weak state he two or three times fainted. By my order Hakim Rukna applied remedies, but whatever methods were resorted to gave no profit .They put him into a palanquin and brought him. He appeared so low and weak that I was astonished. 'He was skin drawn over bones'. Or rather his bones, too, had dissolved. Though painters have striven much in drawing an emaciated face, yet I have never seen anything like this, nor even approaching it. Good God, can a son of man come to such a shape and fashion? As it was a very extraordinary case I directed painters to take his portrait.
The artist too was clearly moved by the scene of human extremity. This painting and the preparatory brush-drawing in Boston (fig. 4), even starker in its rendering of the debilitated physique, have been attrib used by Prof. S. C. Welch to the master Govardhan. Both pictures in different ways convey the same intense pathos. Here the subdued white, grey and tan tones of the interior complement the deadened colours of the cushions, garments and coverlet. The background composition, with a palely insubstantial carpet and bottles in niches and a thin decorative arabesque panel acting as counter-balance, resembles a washed-out Mondrian in its rectangular formality. Shading round the looming silhouettes of the cushions and the wall and niche surrounds give them a shimmering, phantasmagoric quality. The dominant image remains the emaciated pallour of 'Inayat Khan's face, torso and hands. His wintry blue eye (reflecting the eau-de-nil cushion) stares in profile, like a courtier still at attention before the Emperor, yet also with the poignant fixity of ultimate resignation.
From the Laud Ragamala: an illustration to the
musical mode Asavari ragini
Sub-imperial Mughal style, c.1615. Attributed to
Fazl
Gouache with gold on paper; 15.1 x 10.6 cm
Bodleian Library (Laud MS Or. 149, f.19r.) From the sixteenth century, ragamala ('Garland of ragas') became one of the most popular pictorial subjects in Northern India and the Deccan, uniting the main court arts of music, poetry and painting. The essential quality of each of the ragas (musical modes) and their associated raginis (or 'wives') was evoked in Sanskrit or Hindi verses and depicted in paintings, according to established conventions. A full ragamala comprised thirty-six or more pictures. This is one of eighteen surviving pages from an early seventeenth century series, which belong to a historic album presented to the Bodleian by Archbishop Laud in 1640. Asavari is a plaintive mode, said to originate in a snake-charmers' melody and usually performed in the early morning hours. The ragini is depicted as a dark-skinned tribal girl wearing a skirt of leaves. She dwells alone in mountain forests, where her presence charms the snakes down from the sandal-trees. Garlanded with snakes, she sits on a rock from which a stream gushes.
In the absence of her lover, she communes with the entranced cobra held in her hand. The colours are mostly subdued, and birds, rocks and vegetation are reduced to simplified, rhythmical forms. This style is typical of those lesser Mughal artists of the early seventeenth century who fell short of imperial standards but found commissions with Hindu and Muslim courtiers. The Laud Ragamala pages have recently been attributed to Fazl, who is known to have worked for the leading sub-imperial patron, 'Abdul-Rahirn Khan-i-Khanan. commander-in-chief of the Mughal armies.
Illustration to the musical mode Devagandhara ragini
Bundi. Rajasthan, c.1650
Gouache with gold on paper; 21.9 x 12.4 ern
Ashmolean Museum (Mrs M. Barrett Loan)
The musical mode Devagandhara, performed in the morning after sunrise, is conceived as a solitary lady whom the pain of separation from her lover has transformed into an emaciated ascetic. Here only the yogi's jewelled ornaments reveal a vestige of his femininity, though the domed pavilion standing for his hermitage is more like a palace bed-chamber. Its projecting finial in the form of a makara (aquatic monster) holding a bright orange-red pennant syrnbolises the love-god Kama. Signs of natural fecundity abound, with banana and mango trees, harmonious pairs of cranes and ducks, and flowering lotuses. The yogi sits apparently withdrawn, telling his prayer-beads inside a gomukhi bag while toying with a stray strand of hair. This ragini exhibits a commonly found tension between the erotic and ascetic moods, between sensual enjoyment and holy renunciation.
Al Bundi and its near neighbour Kotah in the south-east Rajasthan numerous series of ragamala pictures were produced, both in wall-paintings and on paper. They derive iconographically from a dispersed ragamala, painted in 1591 at Chunar near Benares by artists trained at the Mughal court, which must have been in Bundi possession at this date or not long after. Indigenous Bundi painters interpreted the same subjects in their own robust style, often, as here, recrealing the given theme with a strong flavour of the appropriate rasa or mood.
A dervish receiving a visitor
Bijapur, Deccan, c.1610-20
Gouache with gold and silver on paper;
25.8 x 19.5 ern
Bodleian Library (MS Douce Or.b.2, f.4v.)
In this masterpiece of Bijapur painting, now damaged by flaking, a venerable Sufi is seated on a prayer platform of his shrine retreat. With his hunched frame and overgrown beard and nails, he is clearly a recluse of some sanctity. The shrine has a low dome with pennants flying from a bamboo flagstaff, a group of Shi'ite religious standards, and between them, a luxuriant banyan with a large white parrot and a waterskin on a tripod below. On the left, bullocks are watered from a trough and a monkey could originally be seen on a perch: such obliterated details are fortunately preserved in an eightteenth century copy by the Oudh painter Mihr Chand A dervish visitor in a shawl of penitential white is being introduced by a younger companion holding a fly whisk and drum. The visitor's eyes are closed, in humility or perhaps because of blindness. Like most of the figures present, he bears ritual marks on his fore-arms. He too is a person of consequence, for a seated fakir in the foreground gestures towards him, while cosseting a fat-tailed sheep; glowingly stippled in gold and black. The other fakir beside him (his face now lost) also gazed at the visitor.
We do not know who the dervish and his visitor are. It has been remarked that the latter bears a resemblance to Sultan Ibrahim Adilshah of Bijapur, a great connoisseur of music, art, and poetry, for whom this picture was very probably made. Could the Sultan have chosen to be depicted as a dervish humbling himself before a revered shaikh? Because of his unorthodox leanings towards Hindu culture, Ibrahim is known to have been rebuffed by several eminent Bijapur Sufis of the time. One of these, Shah Abu'l Hasan Qadiri, succeeded in diverting him from his devotion to a Hindu yogi who was said to have revived the Sultan's dead daughter by singing a raga to her. However this may be,
it remains a painting of great refinement, combining brilliantly detailed observation with a pervasive mood of serenity.
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